Traditional cookers for making soups have a container for holding food and a handle for use of handling the container. When making soups, people have to stir food to facilitate heat transfer and uniform heating. For smooth and creamy soups, people use a blender to blend food after food has been cooked. This two-step process involves labor and skills and it is inconvenient and, sometimes, potentially unsafe to operate.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,065,861, issued to Chen on May 23, 2000, describes a soup making apparatus, which can perform blending and boiling functions so as to separate dregs from juice or soup to produce an edible soup or juice. The proposed apparatus has two containers. Users can use one container to initially separate juice or soup from undesired solids and then transfer the soup or juice into the other container, a heating container, to boil the same.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/160,319, by Xu, et al., teaches regarding an automatic soup cooking apparatus, which combines cooking and blending into one-step process. The container sits on a heater for heating food disposed inside the container. However, testing has shown that the efficiency of heat transfer from the heater to the container is very low due to limited heating surface. The cooking process for one load of soup extends too long, diminishing applications. In additions, the container is made of a metal material, such that the container for holding food can be heated. Based on market study results, consumers desire a transparent container, similar to those used for blenders, such that they can observe cooking processes.
Therefore, it remains desirable to provide a blend soup maker that has a blending mechanism for hands free soup making, that can be used to combine blending and heating of food into one single appliance or equipment to save time and efforts, that the cooking jar is at least partially made of a transparent material, such that users can observe cooking processes.